Joan Tower
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman
Copland
Appalachian Spring – suite
Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue (orch Grofé / arr Marcus Roberts)
Jerome Moross
The Big Country – Prelude
Bernstein
Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’
William Grant Still
Three Visions – No. 2, ‘Summerland’
Bernstein
On the Town – Three Dance Episodes
Marcus Roberts Trio
Philharmonia Orchestra
Marin Alsop
Reviewed by: David Gutman
Reviewed: 24 August, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
Having enjoyed associations with numerous UK ensembles over the years, Marin Alsop is currently Principal Guest Conductor with the Philharmonia. This latest alliance seems to have less to do with a shared interest in American music and more to do with the conductor’s eagerness to record Mahler and Shostakovich—her Brahms cycle was famously the first by a woman conductor. For this reason alone, it was a surprise to see Copland and Bernstein et al in the frame for this slightly puzzling, distinctly overlong Prom.
Its first item worked well enough. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man has featured many times and in many contexts at the Royal Albert Hall. So too, now, has this feminist counterblast from American composer Joan Tower. There is a whole series of Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman, the seminal fanfare being retrospectively dedicated to tonight’s conductor. Alsop and the Philharmonia appeared to relish what sounded like Copland meets Panufnik. Actual Copland followed, a rather anaemic account of music that always sounds better if it comes as healing balm after something more tortuously chromatic.
It took nearly ten minutes to ready the platform for the next item: Gershwin—but not as we know it. Only the other night, soprano Angel Blue was permitted to wobble her way self-indulgently through a set of unidiomatic arrangements from the Great American Songbook. One expects better from the Proms, especially given the recent resurgence in ‘historically informed’ performances of show and swing music. Alsop has had to put up with a lot in her career, so perhaps this mangling of the Gershwin classic was water off a duck’s back. Tonight’s star guests were making a return trip to the hall in a version of Rhapsody in Blue they last inflicted on us in 2007. Readers wishing to find out more can seek out Chris Caspell’s review from the time: ‘In short this is a “mash-up” of a seminal jazz-influenced “concerto” played by a perfectly good jazz trio, the sum of the parts being decidedly less than the constituent pieces.’ Nothing has changed in the interim, except perhaps that audiences have grown more accepting (or should that be less discriminating?). The printed souvenir programme gave no inkling that only the orchestral passages of the Rhapsody would survive in recognizable form. With 19 years to prepare you would think the BBC could do better. The signature flash of red at the cuffs of Alsop’s conducting suit had more aesthetic value than anything here.
Perhaps it was all Leonard Bernstein’s fault anyway. Those who acclaim Gershwin’s show tunes have often winced at his excursions into the concert hall. The German-Jewish critic Paul Rosenfeld detected in Gershwin, the Russian Jew, a ‘weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence of the circumstance that the new world attracted the less stable types.’ Gershwin was talented, but vulgar, ‘a gifted composer of the lower, unpretentious order.’ His own probably ironic statement that, on receiving the commission to write his Piano Concerto, he had gone out and bought ‘four or five small books on musical structure to find out what concerto form actually was’ cannot have helped matters. Years later, musicologist and provocateur Hans Keller was prepared to credit Gershwin with an ‘unfailing sense of form (though, like Chopin and Webern, only of small form)’. Writing about Rhapsody in Blue, Bernstein suggested that the piece might not be ‘a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable… You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on bravely as before.’ The Marcus Roberts Trio tested that theory to destruction. There was an encore, a bloated version of an old Alsop staple, the title track from an album she made in the 1990s with her own Concordia Orchestra, Victory Stride: The Symphonic Music Of James P. Johnson. This incarnation was enthusiastic but shaggy.
The rest of the programme suggested that the Alsop/Philharmonia relationship has some way to go. Alsop has always championed lesser-known American talent with distinction, the snippets on offer certainly welcome. The Jerome Moross piece looked like a non-sequitur on paper, and so it proved. It felt like a stray item from a Last Night—an institution with which Alsop is, of course, well acquainted. The Bernstein pops after the interval were again adequate rather than inspired. Lyrical passages had an appealing honesty, livelier ones felt curiously muted, rhythms slack or at least left to fend for themselves. High brass was characterful but approximate. Details were shaped yet contributed little to the overall effect. The miniature by William Grant Still, an African American composer of infinitely greater harmonic sophistication than Florence Price by the way, proved seductive. It could have been by Delius or Vaughan Williams, just about.
The music-making was scarcely distinguished enough to warrant an encore yet we got one anyway. Something to do with the TV cameras? The concert (or perhaps just the populist element) is to be broadcast on BBC Two on Sunday 6 September. To be fair, the ‘Hoe-Down’ from Copland’s Rodeo got the best playing of the night. Still, two hours, twenty minutes is a long time to wait.
Thank your for this most excellent review. I didn’t know what to expect of the Rhapsody and when I did, I was appalled. I did not boo at the end, but I didn’t clap either. I thought about leaving at intermission but stayed and I’m glad because the encore was mighty fine. I had no idea what the first-half encore could have been and the BBC, usually quite good at listing them on the BBC sounds page, failed me this time. Thanks again! I wish I paid more attention to the Copland in the first half but there was more drama in the choir seats than on the stage. A woman was taken ill and from the arena we watched stewards and paramedics going up and down in silence for almost twenty minutes until they finally were able to remove the poor woman just seconds before the piece ended.